As I was on my way to get a COVID test last week (more about that in a minute), there was a woman on the radio talking about how she’d noticed that her website, which supplies recipes based on people’s requests, had been getting an overwhelming number of asks for things that take a substantially longer amount of time to prepare than the dash&go moments she’d been used to posting. She knew the pandemic was the reason and was happy to think more families were gathering round a table together. She noted this moment as a silver lining. There’s no doubt linings of all shiny metals are being found inside of this […] year (space left for your choice of adjective, as I can’t come up with anything I think hits the mark given things like insane and unusual and so on don’t quite do it for me). While for those who aren’t home-style or in-person working, overseeing kids of all ages, and generally attempting Herculean feats of keeping it all together, the reality of spending good time with the people you care about based on the fact that no one has anywhere else to go and you enjoy each other is really quite wonderful.

Take this Covid test business for instance. My attention toward the things that are going on inside myself and also inside those people in my magic corona-bubble has been heightened over the last million months (you say only five, but you know it feels like a gazillion). Where before I may have felt a twinge somewhere inside my general body area and thought, right, a headache or damn, a brain tumor depending on my level of hyperbole that day, then I’d have taken an aspirin and waited it out. But now a twinge happens and my mind goes on high alert. I review every single instance of interaction in the last fourteen days, which honestly is so limited as to make that particular exercise less difficult than usual, and then I start the clock ticking for fourteen days out while watching Dennis and my dad for any signs of not-wellness like an epidemiological spy. Exhausting.

So when I started to feel funky in the stomach and generally ooky (Oxford def: Unpleasant or repellent), I noticed. Waiting a few days, I figured it would pass. It didn’t, then Dennis got a touch of it, and my dad felt briefly funky after visiting our house. At that point, the whole affair shifted into a higher alert for me. Even though stomach ailments were around the bottom of the Covid checklist, who the hell knows with these things. I logged onto our county website in San Bernardino—a place I’ve been visiting on the regular to get my daily sickness and death updates, because knowledge is power?!? or maybe just paranoia—and they couldn’t have made it easier for me to set up and take a test the next day. I felt great love for my new home county in that moment for making it easy to set up the test. Upon reaching the testing site, I noticed again the surge of affection I felt for the youth who were manning the intake stations in lieu of wrangling kids at camp or delivering orders to tables as they may normally be doing during summer break. Along with the volunteers of all ages facilitating the testing, everyone face shielded, masked, gloved, and shrink wrapped in accordance with regulations. They were all lovely and efficient, instructing me how to stick a swab up my nose until my eyes watered and rotate five times, then again on the other side. Standing with me at a very socially conscious distance of many feet with a table dividing us and holding the vial for me to place the swab into, then breaking off the end, screwing on the top and telling me I’d hear within the next three to five days, although, my particular helper whispered (she may have been yelling but for the masks, etc, who could tell) that some people were finding out their results sooner. I am not lying when I say I noticed my eyes welling up with a mixture of gratitude and relief as I walked out the exit. I’m not altogether sure why I felt so strongly. I mean, my stomach was still bothering me, I wouldn’t know if I had the Covid for a couple of days, and the world was still the same messed up place it had been five minutes earlier when I’d walked in, but something about the interaction being sane had moved me.

I wondered if I might be having some kind of reactionary trauma due to so much being crap-ass crazy and wrong right now in the world, so that noticing some simple goodness like making the taking of a COVID test painless—if you don’t consider that swab thingy having to go pretty far up your nose—a moment for simple gratitude. And truthfully, the slowing down of life on a very basic level has allowed for the noticing of moments that I could even call sublime and unusual. Sitting on the porch with my dad and Dennis, for instance. Just staring out at the mountains. Sipping on a drink. Eating some cheese and crackers. Even when Scrubby Jay the Disruptor (yes, s/he’s still very much around) comes along and sits on the rail two feet from our cocktail party and literally screams at us for ten minutes, that’s okay too. I also notice, having been yelled at by SJ to the D weekly, that what s/he probably wants is one of those damn crackers and a piece of effin’ cheese. You can thank my dad and Dennis for starting our winged friend down that culinary road. But no matter, it’s a moment to notice.

I’ve also noticed how I’m hooked into certain quotes that interest me in ways they may not have before. For instance, in the This American Life segment that I linked to in last week’s blog, “Time Bandit,” something that stayed with me was when the main guy mentioned his desire to push in on and explore what was hardest for him to do. (And because he was doing this in front of an audience, bravery was also high on the menu!) To notice what tickles your brain and then stay with that. It’s a thing I’m trying more and more lately. If my emotional heartbeat is raised, taking the time to investigate why has become important. Is it because I have more time to look? Because I have more patience? Because I’m more curious? Because I can’t put it off any longer? I think a variation of maybe and yes to all those things. But also because I notice I don’t despair about how the outcome will be perceived.

This amazing woman Luchita Hurtado, an artist who made her first appearance in a major contemporary art biennial at the age of 97, and who died last week at 99, had this to say in 2019 about being noticed late in her career: “I don’t feel anger, I really don’t. I feel, you know: ‘How stupid of them.’ Maybe the people who were looking at what I was doing had no eye for the future and, therefore, no eye for the present.” I love that quote so much. She’s not saying, oh, shucks, I’m fine because maybe I wasn’t worth the attention. No, it’s more: I know I’m good, it’s those fools who just took forever to get it. And she kept on.

This noticing really plays all ends of the spectrum because as anyone who has been paying attention knows, the COVID 19 pandemic has torn away whatever scrim of denial folx might have viewed social and racial inequality in America through. This now-honest/stark view is a bonus borne on the back of a tragedy. An article in this month’s Atlantic puts it thus: “The dismantling of America’s social safety net left Black people with less income and higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share of the low-paid ‘essential workers’ who were expected to staff grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages without paid sick leave, they couldn’t afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They faced risky commutes on crowded public transportation while more privileged people teleworked from the safety of isolation. Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation can’t easily wash their hands, because they’ve been embroiled in long-running negotiations over the rights to the water on their own lands.” MiLord, we all know/knew this. It didn’t take a well-researched (as always) piece from the Atlantic to tell us so. But, personally, to be pushing in on the reality of how I’ve known this for a while, laid bare by an American leadership, and president in particular, that has fallen down on so many levels as to be criminal is sobering to the point of action. People can hold opinions on defunding police, the removal of Confederate statues and monuments, the merits of universal health care, but this pandemic in America has factually and by the numbers laid the nation’s historical racial and social crimes out for all to see. And the trajectory of my own noticing started at shame for coming to attention now, then merged with conviction that I’m privileged in such an obvious way to continue to do what I can in whatever way to play the long game of getting it right.

Noticing. It’s the best of times and the worst of times: the goodness of what I feel grateful for (BTW, CVD-19 test came back in just over twenty-four hours as negative) leading me into the attention that must be paid so that at the very least, those that are still taking up residence here in the future can have their own menu of noticing balanced between the good and the not-so.